|
By the time you read this the Tower Theatre will have added three plays written by a woman dramatist to its archive without performing any of them this year. How is this possible?
In November 1935 the original guiding light of the Tavistock Repertory Company, Robert Mitchell, directed and designed the Spanish play The Lover, so we are told "as a curtain raiser to the Trojan Women of Euripides". The following year saw a production of The Kingdom of God, with a cast including the founder of the company, Frank Smith, and almost twenty years after that, in 1954, and by now performing at the Tower Theatre itself, Jack Francis directed The Romantic Young Lady. Included in the cast was long time Tower member, Bobbie Peacock, who had also taken a part in The Lover.
The term "The Silver Age" of Spanish Literature is used to describe the period (roughly) between the end of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the "Golden Age" (siglo del oro) having referred to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which saw the work of Cervantes, and most prominently in theatre, Lope De Vega.
Among the early stars of the "Silver Age", few shone as brightly as Gregorio Martinez Sierra. Writer of poetry, plays, and operas, a director, translator, adaptor, publisher, entrepreneur and theatre administrator and later on, Hollywood screen writer, he was a giant of the Spanish theatre. In 1900 he married Maria de la O Lejaraga Garcia and they started to write together. And here is the issue; Gregorio appears to have written practically none of it, apart from a book of poetry saying how wonderful Maria was, and Maria was credited in her own right with only a book of stories for children.
The whole story has now been revealed for the first time in English by Richard Nelson and Colin Chambers in their recently published book Maria Martinez Sierra: A Great Playwright Hidden in Plain Sight (Bloomsbury), which includes the full texts of three of her plays: The Kingdom of God, The Romantic Young Lady and Take Two from One.
The Tavistock Repertory Company developed a reputation early on for performing works of European Theatre (including some premières), when major productions of most European playwrights were rare. Indeed on the first night of its performing life, January 22, 1932, the works staged were an adaption of the French fourteenth century tale Pierre Patelin and The Lady from Alfaqueque by another of the Spanish silver age stars, the Quintero brothers, Serafin and Joaquin. And here is a connection to Maria Martinez Sierra, for just like her plays, the translations of the work of the Quinteros into English was performed by another husband and wife team, Harley and Helen Granville Barker. Harley had been the great hope of the English theatre with his acting, directing and of course, his plays, with Shaw as his great champion, but with Helen he moved to France and concentrated on their translations from German, French and Spanish and their famous prefaces to the plays of Shakespeare. It is likely that without them, most of Maria's plays would still be untranslated, and Helen had to endure years of antagonism (particularly from Shaw) for allegedly 'removing' Harley from the English theatre.
In 1974 following the death of Maria Martinez Sierra, (aged only just short of 100) a shipping crate made its way to Spain from Buenos Aires, where Maria had lived in exile from Franco's Spain – she had in 1933 been elected as the Socialist MP for Granada - containing letters from Gregorio that confirmed Maria's authorship of most of 'their' plays. It would be nice if, fifty years later, in 2024, some of her works could be staged, to give her the credit she deserves as one of the most prolific and performed woman playwrights of the twentieth century, a credit that she never enjoyed in life.
|
